The Hireling's Tale (2 page)

Read The Hireling's Tale Online

Authors: Jo Bannister

Tags: #Suspense

BOOK: The Hireling's Tale
11.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The forensic medical examiner took a little longer over his examination but then he confirmed Barry Lacey’s diagnosis. The girl was undoubtedly dead, and had been for several hours.
‘How many?’
Dr Crowe shook his head. ‘Ask me after the post mortem.’
Detective Superintendent Shapiro smiled tolerantly. He knew the man wasn’t being deliberately difficult, it was just that all his kind really hated being asked this particular question. Whatever he said, sooner or later he would be proved wrong. ‘I will. But if you can give me even a rough idea now we’ll know where to start our enquiries. Less than three hours and she was alive when the boat left Castlemere. Between three and fifteen hours and she came aboard at Mere Basin. More than fifteen hours and she was on the boat when it arrived in Castlemere.’
The FME frowned. But he knew that, this early in the game, even a ball-park guess was more help than no guess at all. So he did what he always did: swallowed his professional pride and gave it his best shot.
‘I think it’s your problem, Superintendent. She’s certainly been dead longer than three hours. Best guess? - twelve to fifteen. I’ll be surprised if we find anything to put it outside that range.’
‘So around nine last night would be a reasonable time for it to have happened.’
Crowe nodded, warily. He was a large young man, and people still sometimes took him for a medical student. In fact that cherubic face hid a sharp, enquiring intellect. ‘It would. But why do you think it was?’
Barry Lacey was sitting in Shapiro’s car where they’d been talking a few minutes before. He wasn’t under arrest, he just hadn’t got enough of a grip on himself to get up yet. ‘They arrived in Mere Basin about eight-thirty last night, moored the boat and went into town for some supper. They got back about eleven. The two hours they were missing would be the easiest time for her to get on board.’
‘Unless they know more than they’re telling.’
Shapiro arched a sceptic eyebrow. ‘You mean, they did her in, hid her in their boat, brought her out here, and
then
called us?’
Put like that, it didn’t seem very likely. Crowe sniffed. ‘You’re the detective - I’m only an old-fashioned pathologist with a posh new title.’
Shapiro grinned. ‘Well, Donovan’ll be pleased anyway.’
The FME puzzled over that but still didn’t understand.
‘Why?
’
‘A corpse on a canal boat and it turns out to be somebody else’s case? He’d be heartbroken.’
Detective Sergeant Donovan lived on a narrow-boat. He was widely believed to have canal water running through his veins.
‘All right, next question,’ said Shapiro. ‘How did she die?’
That really was beyond the pale. Crowe stared at him indignantly. ‘Oh, come on … !’
‘I know, I know - that’s what the post mortem’s for. But I need some idea now. Are we talking murder? Could it have been an accident?’
The FME thought for a moment before replying. ‘She fell. I don’t know why she fell, that’s your job, but it was the fall that killed her. See the blood-flow from her nose and ear? - that says she landed there on her back, lived just long enough to bleed a little and then died. There’s blood on the things she’s lying on that matches exactly, and the back of her skull is comminuted in relation to the surface under her. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been moved since the time of death.
‘But dying wasn’t the first thing to go wrong with her evening. Somebody beat seven bells out of her. Those bruises on her face and body, she didn’t get them falling into the hold. They didn’t have long to develop but they were certainly caused prior to death. The fall finished her off, but she wasn’t having a good time when it happened.’
‘Chain locker,’ said a disembodied voice with an Irish accent.
Dr Crowe looked around in surprise, but there were still only the two of them standing on the deck. ‘Donovan?’
‘Down here.’ He’d commandeered a dinghy and was groping his way round the outside of the narrow-boat, looking for evidence. Evidence of what it was hard to say: Shapiro suspected he’d just seen the chance to get into a boat for ten minutes. The dinghy’s owner, a boy of about twelve, was standing in rapt fascination on the bank. ‘It’s not a hold, it’s a chain locker.’
‘I see,’ nodded Crowe. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to revise my entire diagnosis in the light of that.’ He winked at Shapiro and clambered up the gangway on to the bank.
The hire boat
Guelder Rose
was tied up at the first waterside cottage she’d come to after Barry Lacey’s discovery. This was some five miles east of Castlemere, a bit past Chevening. Shapiro had been in his office when the call came in, three minutes later he was on his way. Lacey was too shocked to make perfect sense, but it was hard to see how the body of a naked girl on a boat where she had no right to be could be other than a suspicious death.
Donovan was actually off duty today. No one had called him, although his expertise would be valuable to the investigation. Shapiro knew he’d appear by a process similar to magnetism when rumour of a corpse on a boat reached up the canal as far as Broad Wharf. In fact, the waterfront version of Jungle Telegraph must have been operating at peak efficiency, because Donovan’s bike gunned to a halt outside the cottage while Shapiro was still talking to the Scenes of Crime Officer.
‘Found anything?’ asked Shapiro. He couldn’t be
more specific because he didn’t know what Donovan was looking for.
Donovan hauled himself up on to the short foredeck of the
Guelder Rose
. It was raining again: he looked as if he’d been in the canal. When he shook his head the water flew off the black rat-tails of his hair. ‘No sign of a boat coming alongside. No scratches, no mud, not even a rub-mark from the fenders. More likely she was boarded from the port side.’
Shapiro was puzzled. In more than thirty years on the job he’d seen dead bodies in odder places than this. He’d seen naked dead bodies before, too. But he couldn’t construct a sequence of events that put a naked dead body in the hold - sorry, the chain locker – of the
Guelder Rose
. It wasn’t an excess of party spirit that led this girl to streak through Mere Basin at nine o’clock at night: she’d been beaten up, the last thing she’d have felt like was playing games. She might have been looking for help, she might have been looking for somewhere to hide. Maybe in the end it was a simple mistake - taking the canvas cover for a solid surface - that killed her. But if she was wandering round naked on a dock full of people, why did nobody help her? Or failing that, complain?
‘How did she get there?’
Donovan shrugged. He was a tall man, stick-thin, with bony shoulders made for the job. ‘She fell through the hatch.’
‘With no clothes on?’
‘I doubt anybody went down to undress her afterwards. For one thing, they couldn’t have got out again without ripping away more of the canvas.’
‘All right. So why did no one notice? Not the Laceys, they were in town, but the Basin’s full of people up to midnight and later. If she walked up the wharf with no clothes on around nine o’clock at night, climbed on to a boat and then fell through a hatch, why did nobody see her?’
‘Maybe she wasn’t naked then.’
Shapiro considered that. ‘So she climbed on to the boat, did a strip act and then fell through the hatch. You think that would go unnoticed?’
‘Maybe she didn’t walk. Maybe she was helped, or carried. Maybe someone wrapped her in a coat or a blanket, carried her on board and dropped her through the hatch. Then he took his blanket away with him.’
‘Why tear the canvas? Why not just lift the hatch? It wasn’t locked, there were only a couple of split pins securing it. Lacey got it open easily enough. If somebody wanted to hide her, that was the thing to do. She could have been down there for days before anybody - er - smelled a rat. I’m right, aren’t I? - a boating party would have no reason to go in there?’
‘Wouldn’t think so,’ said Donovan. ‘I don’t use mine much, except as a dog-kennel. Mostly you keep your fenders over the side and your warps coiled on deck, ready for use.’
‘So, apart from the torn canvas, it would have been a good way to dispose of a body. By the time she started to smell there’d have been no way to establish when and where she came aboard.’
‘But the canvas
was
torn,’ objected Donovan. ‘Someone was bound to notice, sooner rather than later.’
‘Exactly. So he was more concerned with getting her off his hands than with concealing her long-term. He was in a hurry. He was afraid of being seen; or of being missed; or maybe it wasn’t him who killed her, he was just helping out, if he could get her off his hands he didn’t care how quickly she was found.’
‘You reckon it’s murder then.’
Shapiro scratched his eyebrow with a thumbnail. He was fifty-six, a solidly-built man with a slightly rumpled, lived-in face indistinguishable from a thousand others except by a particularly sharp pair of clear grey eyes. ‘The fall that killed her may have been an accident, but according to Crowe she was beaten before she died. It may or may not be murder, but it’s certainly one for us.’
‘So she was hurting, maybe she was concussed. Maybe she wandered on to the boat looking for somewhere to hide and fell through the hatch.’
‘Then what became of the blanket? If she came on board alone she was already naked, in which case someone would have seen. If she was wrapped up enough to pass unnoticed, somebody took the blanket away afterwards.’ Shapiro squatted beside the open hatch. SOCO and the FME had been down there with her, they couldn’t do their jobs at arm’s length, but there was nothing Shapiro could learn from such close examination. He’d leave her in peace until the paramedics removed her.
He found himself trying to estimate her age. Twenty-four, twenty-six? Under the bruises and the blood she was a pretty woman. Her hair was dyed blonde, the bubbly perm a recent investment, and
enough of her make-up had survived the assaults on her to show that she’d taken some trouble with it. She’d made an effort to look good for whoever had done this to her.
He felt a surge of anger under his breastbone. People assumed that policemen became hardened to the aftermath of human tragedy, but Shapiro never had. He’d learned how to deal with it, both practically and emotionally, and that made it easier to see what he had to see and still somehow get on with the job. But every time he took a phonecall that led him here, that left him looking at the lifeless wreckage of a human being who’d begun their last day full of the same hopes, fears, concerns and things to do as everyone else and ended it on a slab, the long experience that stopped him throwing up was no protection against this burgeoning anger. At the waste of a life; at the sheer impertinence of whoever presumed to take it.
He gritted his teeth to keep his voice low. ‘One way or another, someone’s responsible for this girl’s death. Someone beat her black and blue, then he brought her to this boat and pushed her out of sight to die alone in the darkness. Then he folded up his blanket and went home. I want the bastard, Donovan.
‘Ask round in the Basin, see if anyone saw anything. It might not have looked like a man carrying a woman - it could have looked like a couple of drunks leaning on one another, or somebody delivering equipment to the boat. He may have had a van; he may not have been alone. But he must have been there. Find someone who saw him.’
‘Where will you be?’
‘I’ll be trying to find out why she’s been dead for fifteen hours and still nobody’s reported her missing.’
 
 
Part of the answer came from the autopsy. Shapiro attended in person. It wasn’t strictly necessary - a police officer had to be present but it didn’t have to be him - but he worked on the basis that the cadaver was the only witness to the murder that he presently knew of and the post mortem was her only chance to speak. If he wanted to hear what she had to say first-hand, rather than through the filter of a formal report, he had to be there, ready to ask questions, when the FME was giving his running commentary to the tape.
When she heard his heavy step pass her door, Detective Inspector Liz Graham put aside what she was doing and followed her chief to his office. He had a spare chair for visitors but Liz took Donovan’s favourite spot, on the windowsill overlooking the canal. ‘So do we know anything more about our Jane Doe now?’
Shapiro nodded and lowered himself behind his desk. He looked glum, his broad lived-in face falling into dejected creases. This stage of an investigation was often depressing. You had a corpse, and no killer, and not enough facts to think you’d ever find one. Over the hours and days ahead they started trickling in, one at a time, building up a picture of the victim and how she spent her last hours that by degrees
focused suspicion on a particular individual - usually someone she knew, very often someone
you
knew. But this first day, unless there were eyewitnesses or real smoking-gun evidence, the task could look impossible.
‘Two things,’ he said. ‘How she died, and how she lived.’
She died, as Crowe had predicted, of falling through the canvas hatch and smashing her head on the steel plates below. But if she hadn’t collided with the bottom of the
Guelder Rose
she still wouldn’t have been in the peak of health. There was enough cocaine in her system to drop a donkey.

Other books

This is For Real by James Hadley Chase
Water Lily by Susanna Jones
The Accidental Lawman by Jill Marie Landis
White Crocodile by K.T. Medina
A Wife by Accident by Victoria Ashe
Dying for a Cupcake by Denise Swanson